Battle still rages where my brave great-uncle fell in Gaza back in 1917

Thousands of first world war soldiers fell at Gaza battling the Turks. After the recent clash of Israeli and Palestinian forces, Mark Urban visited the badly damaged Commonwealth cemetery to find shrapnel scars on his great-uncle's headstone

In Gaza even the dead get dragged into the ongoing struggle. During January's fighting between the Israelis and Palestinians, the main Commonwealth War Cemetery in Gaza became a battleground.

Some 280 of the headstones at the graveyard just outside Gaza City were damaged. The Israeli military blamed secondary explosions from a Palestinian ammunition store nearby that they had hit. Locals argued that Israeli troops occupying a hill overlooking this verdant patch of Gaza had let loose a plethora of weapons at it.

I wanted to find out what had really happened, because I had a personal stake in that cemetery. My mother's uncle, a young lad of just 18 called Walter Holmes, was killed in Gaza in 1917.

Many people don't even realise that there are thousands of fallen British troops buried in the midst of this intractable modern-day maelstrom. The great majority of those laid to rest in the two Commonwealth cemeteries in the Gaza Strip fell during 1917, when the British were trying to fight their way into Palestine against intense resistance from the Ottoman Turks, who still at that time controlled much of the Middle East.

My great-uncle's battalion, the Isle of Wight Rifles, was a typical bunch of mates who had joined up in a fit of patriotic excitement at the start of the first world war. They had already fought the Turks at Gallipoli in 1915, where allied forces had suffered horrific losses.

When the Isle of Wight Rifles crossed the start line for their attack on 19 April 1917 they can have been under few illusions as to how hard their fight against the Turkish enemy would be. What became known as the Second Battle of Gaza proved to be the kind of disaster well known to students of the western front. Enemy machine-guns and shells cut down the British attackers, who suffered 6,000 casualties in three days. Of 800 men in my great-uncle's battalion who went over the top, only 92 returned. Can you imagine the grief at home, on the Isle of Wight, as hundreds of telegrams arrived?

The awful sacrifice of April 1917 was followed by a more successful campaign that autumn in which a new commander, General Edmund Allenby, waged a devastating war against the Turks. In little more than one year he forced them out of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, setting the scene for the creation both of Israel and the modern Middle East. This gives the British war cemeteries unwelcome associations for many Arabs.

Fifteen years ago, when I was the BBC's correspondent in Jerusalem, we simply used to drive in to Gaza. Alas, at that time, when access was so easy, I still believed that Walter Holmes had fallen at Gallipoli. My mother's discovery that he was in fact in Gaza came at around the time of Hamas's takeover in June 2007.

In recent years there have been problems of Israel restricting access but also of personal safety after the kidnapping of our BBC colleague Alan Johnston. On the few occasions that I have managed to get into Gaza, the obvious imperative was to report on the difficult humanitarian and political situation, rather than go in search of family history.

In the wake of January's fighting the picture changed. The cemetery had become part of the post-conflict picture. Also, other journalists had already done much to catalogue the impact on the people of Gaza of January's campaign. Having been sent to cover the Israeli elections, I asked my editors to allow me to stay on a couple of extra days to do the war graves story.

As it is, journalists get a privileged deal when it comes to access through the Erez crossing point between Israel and Gaza. Talking to Paul Price, the local supervisor for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, I learned that, one year into his posting, he has yet to get in. The task of surveying the damage has fallen to the Palestinian gardeners who try to keep the graveyards up to the immaculate standards of that organisation.

Arriving at the Gaza War Cemetery on a balmy February morning, I was greeted by Ibrahim Jeradah, who had proudly pinned his MBE to his jacket. Ibrahim had been working there for 51 years, formerly as chief gardener but in retirement as nightwatchman. As we walked around surveying the damage, Ibrahim murmured: "All wars are bad." He spoke also of the bombardments that had sent neighbouring residents fleeing.

One tank shell fired from the nearby hill had taken down 20 headstones before embedding itself, unexploded, in the ground. In many places we found fragments of shrapnel in the grass or beside chipped headstones. The tail sections of 120mm mortar bombs completed the picture of a place that had been peppered with suppressive fire. In quite a few spots there were scorch marks on the grass that Ibrahim attributed to white phosphorus shells.

Finding the headstone of Lance Serjeant Walter Holmes, I saw the marks of two shrapnel strikes upon it. It was a melancholy moment, but any hurt I may have felt must have been minor compared with that of the living residents nearby.

One house overlooking the cemetery belongs to Hani Zayara. It has been very badly damaged by shell and heavy machine-gun fire. He believed the Israeli aim was "to make people from here run away and get them out of the neighbourhood".

Another man, Adil al-Jidba, told us how he had fled to Zarqa, which he hoped would be a safer place, but had lost three of his children there to Israeli shelling. Every resident we spoke to denied militants had been shooting at the Israelis from the vicinity of the cemetery, but this assertion didn't amount to much since all were adamant they had fled during the Israeli incursion.

Our observations confirmed the notion that Israeli fire damaged the cemetery. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has not yet decided whether it will press for compensation. It successfully claimed almost £18,000 for damage caused by the Israeli army during an incursion in 2006. In the case of January's damage, we have yet to hear from the Israelis what kind of threat they say they were facing around the graveyard.

There is little hope of anyone paying up for £70,000 of damage done to their other cemetery in the Gaza Strip, which is at Deir al-Balah. We went there to see the remnants of the main altar, which was blown up in April last year. At Deir al-Balah the atmosphere was edgier and we only stayed for 15 minutes.

Some diplomats we spoke to blamed the same Islamic militants who kidnapped Alan Johnston for this destruction, but during our visit locals put it down to "Salafists" - those who follow a simplified and literalist version of Islam. Either way the symbol of a stone cross in Gaza was too much for them to stomach. It's a great shame, particularly since the graves of many Jewish soldiers in the Commonwealth cemeteries seem to have been respected by Gazans.

When the Commonwealth War Graves Commission was founded, there was a determination that all of those who had paid the ultimate sacrifice would lie together - a band of brothers regardless of rank, colour or religion. In this vital sense the cemeteries at Gaza and Deir al-Balah represent corners of foreign fields that are forever defined by those values. My thoughts, as I laid a crumpled poppy on my great-uncle's grave, ran to how hard it is to find respect for those ideals in the modern Middle East. People are too preoccupied with the conflict of the moment to respect these places and some even despise what they represent.

• Mark Urban's journey to the Gaza War Cemetery can be seen on BBC2's Newsnight at 10.30pm on Tuesday

How Allenby's conquest led to the Intifada

• In 1917, Gaza City formed the western anchor point of the Turkish Gaza-Beersheba defensive line, which British forces had failed to take on two previous occasions. Under the new command of General Edmund Allenby, Beersheba was first taken by Australian light cavalry, then in early November an attack saw Gaza fall to the British with more than 10,000 Turkish troops captured.

• After the first world war, Gaza and the rest of Palestine came under the British mandate negotiated largely with France. Their joint action claimed legitimacy from the League of Nations. It was opposed by the US, which saw it as an attempt to divide up the Ottoman empire between the great powers. In 1917, in the Balfour Agreement, Britain promised to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, "it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine".

• In August 1929 riots across Palestine, following growing tensions that had begun in September of the previous year, led much of the small Jewish community in Gaza to flee.

• As part of the UN partition plan of 1947, Gaza was assigned to the Arab Palestinian state, but following the outbreak of war on Israel's declaration of statehood in 1948 Gaza - swollen by a massive influx of Arab refugees - was administered by Egypt, a situation that continued until its conquest and illegal occupation by Israel in 1967.